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How do I redirect or prevent access to all websites except for one?

xCxStylex

xCxStylex

Senior member
Hi all,

I'm looking to help out a friends small business, which wants to have a computer available to use for non-employees. They want to either redirect or restrict traffic to their own website, which is externally hosted.

Is there any easy way I can do without having to set up a DNS server or anything really advanced?
 
It is Not really clear what they want to do.

How, where, from what, the None employees suppose to use the Internet?

Do they have a server in the business?

 
So... are they just trying to have a computer to view their catalog or something? If that's the case why not just have the site hosted locally?
 
the simple answer to a vague question would be setup a content filter or firewall to blacklist everything but that one site. It wouldn't redirect to the site but that nothing else would be accessible. Depending on the OS and if there's a server it shouldn't be hard to setup the redirection.
 
I apologize if the question was vague.

Jack - Basically, customers who enter the store will be able to use a specific computer to browse their online catalog/database. There's a win2003 server for employees and their workstations at the back office, but this is a separate computer at the retail front of the store that customers can use.

octopus - Because their website and database are hosted externally, inventory wouldn't be updated or synched if the site was located locally. There might be a way to do this, but guessing on how ghetto the hosting is, I kind of doubt it >_< When you ftp to the server, it IS a domestic IP, but it's a proxy... the actual servers are probably in India or China or somewhere else cuz they're damn slow and the company is Chinese or something 😛


Pantlzeg - that sounds perfect! I think the firewall is a sonicwall or dlink.
Server is 2k3. Do you have any resources or links to point me to so that I could learn how to set up a policy (that would block or redirect, either one) only for the catalog computer and not the regular employees?


 
Vista could likely handle this natively, with its "Parental Controls" option. Also, MS has lots of resources on making "Kiosk PCs". There are also several applications that can be loaded to keep users from making ANY changes to the hard drive.

As part of your "hardening" of this PC, you might want to remove/disable/plug the USB ports and remove any floppy or CDROM drives.
 
Or a really simple solution is to go into network settings for the NIC and put the dns as 127.0.0.1 .
Then add the site you want to the host file.

This isn't perfect because someone could still enter a ip address in the browser and get a site, but 99% of people don't know ip addresses for anything.
 
Originally posted by: Modelworks
Or a really simple solution is to go into network settings for the NIC and put the dns as 127.0.0.1 .
Then add the site you want to the host file.
Click to expand...
Yap the page that I linked to explains exactly how to do it.

The Host file can be set as Read Only hidden file.

 
Software Firewalls (like the Free PCTools) that allow establishing Rules can easily do it too.

You establish a simple rule to allow only the IP of the desired site and block every thing else on the Internet side.

Then the firewall can be protected from unauthorized changes with a password.
 
The EZLAN link is perfect. Thank you all so very much for your time and additional security tips as well 🙂

I can probably google additional MS resources on "kiosk pc," thank you as well!
 
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